Overview
Dr Edwin Locke and Dr Gary Latham are professors from the 60's who developed a goal setting theory — 5 principles that maximize the likelihood of achieving those goals. Their theory continues to live on in modified forms of goal-setting frameworks nowadays.
The principles are as follows:
1. Clarity: necessary for employees to understand how expectations are being defined.
2. Challenge: not so easy such that it kills motivation, but not so hard such that it's impossible to attain.
3. Commitment: how do you facilitate the acceptance of a goal? Consider the culture inherent to your company - perhaps participatory decision-making is required for commitment.
4. Feedback: depending on the goal, a higher or lower frequency of feedback is appropriate to maintain (or redirect) focus
5. Task complexity: break the task into levels of complexity - if there are too many, you might need to break it down into multiple tasks for your product team to effectively tackle it.
